John Stachel’s reply to Senta Troemel-Ploetz and Evan
Harris Walker, including an analysis of Einstein’s use of personal pronouns in
his letters to Mileva Marić

The following is
a talk delivered by John Stachel to the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, New Orleans, March 5, 1990. published in J. Stachel, Einstein
from ‘B’ to ‘Z’ (2002), Cambridge, MA: Birkhäuser, pp. 31-38,
republished here by permission of the author.

Preliminary
Comments on the AAAS Papers

(March 5, 1990)

A reply to
sensational claims is always difficult. A German statesman of the nineteenth
century put the problem well: “Denials never have the fascination and the
impact of false reports.” All that one can do is to weigh the evidence put
forward in support of such a claim in the light of all the available evidence
bearing on the question. This does not result in high drama, but perhaps in the
long run it may do some good.

I do not yet have
copies of Walker’s or Troemel-Ploetz’s papers; so all I can do is to add some
preliminary comments based on some hasty notes on their talks that I took at
the AAAS meeting.

Troemel-Ploetz
states that it is common knowledge in Zurich that Marić collaborated with
Einstein, solved Einstein’s mathematical problems, etc. She also cites from the
biography of Marić by Desanka Trubhović Gjurić (Im Schatten
Albert Einsteins: Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić)a number of comments by relatives and friends of the Marić family
indicating that it was well-known in her home town that she did made important
scientific contributions. Many things are well known in this world: For
example, it was well known in Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s that the Jews
were the cause of all the people’s misfortunes. And, as one of James Thurber’s
“Fables for our Times” points out, it is well known that rabbits, by stamping
on the ground with their hind feet, cause earthquakes. The question is not
whether some assertion is common knowledge, but what is the evidence that it is
true? I shall go into their claims in detail when I have Walker's and
Troemel-Ploetz’s papers, but here I must emphasize that bare assertions,
particularly by interested parties, do not constitute proof of such assertions,
even when these assertions are repeated in print, even in a book.

Walker makes much
of a claim by Trbuhović-Gjurić that Abram Joffe, the Russian
physicist, saw the manuscript of the 1905 relativity paper before it was
published, and that it had both Einstein’s and Marić’s names on it. Dr.
Robert Schulmann, an editor of the Einstein Papers, interviewed Dr.
Trbuhović-Gjurić several years ago (she has since died), and asked
her about the evidence for this claim. She cited the published memoirs of Joffe
as her source. However, in his memoirs, Joffe makes no such claim.
Indeed, apart from the fact that it is not made by Joffe, the claim is suspect
– to put it politely – on a number of grounds. First of all, Joffe is supposed
to have seen the manuscript because he was then working with Wilhelm Roentgen,
a member of the Curatorium [Board of Editors] of the Annalen der Physik, the
journal to which the paper was submitted. But Roentgen was an experimentalist,
and there is no reason why a purely theoretical paper should have been
submitted to him for review when two members of the Curatorium, Paul Drude (the
editor) and Max Planck, were both outstanding theorists quite capable of
evaluating the paper – indeed, both obviously did read it since they soon made
reference to it in their own published writings. Second, if both names were on
the paper when it was submitted to the Annalen, who removed Marić’s
name? The Annalen had no policy forbidding publication of articles by
women! Third, if Roentgen read the paper even before it was published in 1905,
why did he wait until 1906 to ask Einstein for a reprint of it? I think
Trbuhović-Djurić's claim must be rejected on the grounds of both lack
of evidence and of inherent implausibility.

I could give
numerous other examples of assertions about Einstein that have been repeated
from source to source but proved to be totally unsubstantiated when subject to
close examination (for some examples, see Schulmann and Stachel, Comments on
Pyenson’s Review of “The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 1, The Early
Years” available from me on request).

Troemel-Ploetz
claims that discrimination was responsible for Marić’s failure to graduate
from the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School, or Poly. She claims that both
Einstein and Marić failed the final examinations for the diploma, but that
Einstein was allowed to graduate while Marić was not. This claim is based
on an unsubstantiated assertion that a grade of “5” (out of “6”) was needed to
pass at that time. I have searched the regulations of the Poly in vain for any
such rule. The report of the grades by the head of Section VIA of the Poly
(Vol. 1, p. 247) includes no statement that Einstein had failed the
examination. Since Einstein and Marić were the only two students taking
the examination in physics that year, all we can do is compare their grades, as
I did in my paper, and note that Einstein’s average was 4.91 while Marić’s
was 4.00. If there was discrimination against Marić in grading their
examinations, it must have been differential discrimination since it was her grade
in mathematics (theory of functions) that was primarily responsible for pulling
her average down significantly below Einstein’s. But, as indicated in my paper,
women had been graduating from the Poly for decades by the time Marić took
the exams (twice) and failed, and continued to do so after she left. So the
fact that she was a woman cannot by itself account for her failure. Any charge
of discrimination will have to answer the question: What did the examiners have
against Marić specifically?

Both Walker and Troemel-Ploetz suggest in no uncertain terms that, at the very least,
Marić and Einstein collaborated on the special theory of relativity, if
the basic ideas were not actually hers alone. The only piece of contemporary
evidence offered in support of this claim is Einstein's statement in a letter
to Marić:

How happy and
proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on
relative motion to a successful conclusion! (letter of 27 March 1901, Vol. 1,
p. 282,translation from Stachel, Physics Today, May 1987, p. 46).
[See this volume, p. 171].

First of all, let
us look at the context in which this statement occurs. It does not occur in a
scientific context, but in the course of Einstein's attempt to reassure
Marić of his love in a letter written from his home in Milan during a
separation occasioned by his attempt to find a job – a separation about which
she was not very happy:

Right now Michele
[Besso] is staying in Trieste at his parents with his wife and child and only
returns here [Milan] in about 10 days. You need have no fear that I will say a
word to him or anyone else about you. You are and will remain a holy shrine to
me into which no one may enter; I also know that ofall people you love
me most deeply and understand me best. I also assure you that no one here
either dares to or wants to say anything bad about you. How happy and proud I
will be when the two ofus together will have brought our work on
relative motion to a successful conclusion! When I look at other people, then I
truly realize what you are! (27 March 1901, Vol. 1, p. 282).

Einstein is
clearly a young man, deeply in love, who has relaxed his own ego boundaries to
include Marić within them – a not uncommon phenomenon among lovers –
although he maintained a wary and perhaps even hostile sense of separation
between the two of them and the rest of the world. That a lover in such a
situation should over-value the accomplishments of the beloved, and identify
the achievements of one member of the couple as achievements of the pair is
also not uncommon. (See the addendum at the end of this paper.)

Bearing this
possibility in mind, let us examine Einstein's and Marić's other comments
in their correspondence that bear on the topics that led in 1905 to the paper
that Einstein called “On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” the paper that
constitutes the foundation of what is now called the special theory of
relativity. The very term “electrodynamics of moving bodies” is used in the
first letter by Einstein that touches on the subject, his letter of 10 August
1899. In this remarkable letter, he comments at some length on the topic, his
remarks taking up about one-half of the letter:

I am more and
more convinced that the electrodynamics of moving bodies, as currently
presented, is not correct, and that it should be possible to present it in a
simpler way. The introduction of the term “ether” into theories of electricity
leads to the notion of a medium of whose motion one can speak without, I
believe, being able to associate any physical meaning with such a statement. I
believe that electrical forces can only be directly defined for empty space, as
Hertz also emphasizes. Further electrical currents are to be considered not as
“the vanishing of electrical polarization in time,” but as motion of true
electric charges, the physical reality of which seems to be proven by the
electrochemical equivalent. Mathematically, they are then always to be
considered in the form dX/dx + . + . Electrodynamics would then be the
theory of the motions of moving electricities and magnetisms in empty space:
Which of the two conceptions must be selected must be decided by the radiation
experiments.

This case is one
of the few in which we happen to have Marić’s reply to Einstein's letter
(actually to this and Einstein's previous letter). What does she say in
response to his comments on electrodynamics? Nothing! She discusses her
happiness on getting his letters, she approves of his statement that he is not
studying too much, she sends greetings to Einstein’s mother and sister (with
whom he was vacationing), she worries about her impending examinations. Near
the end of theletter, she writes: In truth, you aren’t letting anyone
read my letters, you must promise me that (Vol. 1, p. 229), suggesting that she
shares his feeling it is the two of them against the world (see his letter
cited above). But there is not a wordabout any scientific topic in her
letter, let alone a response to Einstein's lengthy discussion of his ideas
about the electrodynamics of moving bodies.

The next letter
that refers to this topic is his of 10 September 1899:

A good way of
investigating how a body’s relative motion with respect to the luminiferous
ether affects the velocity of propagation of light in transparent bodies
occurred to me in Aarau [a Swiss town Einstein had recently visited]. I
have also thought of a theory on this subject that seems to me to be very
plausible. But enough of this! (Vol. 1, p. 230, translation from Stachel, Physics
Today, May 1987, p. 45).

I have added, and
will continue to add my own emphasis to each use of “I,” “my,” etc. in his
letters. If we are going to attach great significance to one use of “our” in
this context, I insist that we attach similar significance to his many uses of
first person singular pronouns in the same context. It should also be borne in
mind that his letters cited were written during periods when Einstein and
Marić were separated for some time; so there is a strong presumption that
any new work he reports to her during these periods really is exclusively his.

A couple of weeks
later, during the same period of separation, he writes:

I also wrote to
Professor [Wilhelm] Wien in Aachen about the work on the relative motion of the
luminiferous ether with respect to ponderable matter, which “the boss”
[Heinrich Friedrich Weber, Einstein’s physics professor at the Polytechnical School] treated in such a stepmotherly fashion. I read a very
interesting paper from the year 1893 by this man [Wien] on the same topic (Vol.
1, pp. 233‑234, translation from Stachel, Physics Today, May 1987,
pp. 45‑46).

The paper by
Wien, entitled “On Questions Relating to the Translatory Motion of the
Luminiferous Ether” discusses a number of experiments, including the renowned
experiment by Michelson and Morley on this topic. I take this as evidence that
Einstein knew something about this experiment by the time he wrote this letter.
Even if Marić were the person who first informed Einstein about this
experiment, as Dr. Troemel‑Ploetz suggested in New Orleans on the basis
of the flimsiest evidence, it would not have been a very significant input into
the development of the special theory of relativity. But factually, this letter
shows that Einstein would have found out about it on his own, in any case, by
September 1899.

There is now a
gap of over a year in references to this topic. The next reference is in
Einstein's letter of 27 March 1901, the one about “our work” cited first above.
The next letter that may refer to this topic is that of Marić to Einstein
in early November 1901. Einstein had been befriended by Alfred Kleiner,
Professor of Physics at the University of Zurich, and begun to explore the
possibility of a doctoral thesis with Kleiner. In response to a missing letter
of his, Marić writes Einstein:

How pleased I am
that Kleiner was nice to you! And during what holiday could you perhaps carry
out the investigation? (Vol. 1, p. 316).

This may
be a reference to an experiment that Einstein had just recently described in a
letter to his friend and fellow student at the Poly, Marcel Grossmann:

On the
investigation of the relative motion of matter with respect to the luminiferous
ether, a considerably simpler method has occured to me, which is based
on customary interference experiments. If only relentless fate would give me
the necessary time and peace! When we see each other, I will tell
you more about it (Einstein to Marcel Grossmann, 6 September 1901, Vol. 1, p.
316, translation from Stachel, Physics Today, May 1987, p. 46).

On 17 December
1901, Einstein writes Marić:

I am now working
very eagerly on an electrodynamics of moving bodies, which promises to become a
capital paper. I wrote you that I doubted the correctness of the
ideas about relative motion [that letter has not been found]. But my doubts
were based solely on simple mathematical error. Now I believe in it more
than ever! (Vol. 1, pp. 325‑326,translation from Stachel, Physics
Today, May 1987, pp. 46‑47).

Two days later Einstein
wrote Marić that he had

spent the whole
afternoon with Kleiner in Zurich and explained my ideas on the
electrodynamics of moving bodies to him. …He advised me to
publish my ideas about the electromagnetic theory of light for moving
bodies together with the experimental method. He found the experimental method
proposed by me to be the simplest and most appropriate one conceivable.
... I shall most certainly write the paper in the coming weeks (Vol. 1,
p. 328,translation from Stachel, Physics Today,May 1987,
p. 47).

Whatever Einstein
may have written then, he did not publish anything on the topic until 1905.
Perhaps part of the explanation may be found in his final reference to the
topic, on 28 December 1901:

I now want to
buckle down to work and study what Lorentz and Drude have written on the
electrodynamics of moving bodies. [Jakob] Ehrat [a friend and former fellow Polytechnical School student] must get the literature for me (Vol. 1, p. 330, translation
from Stachel, Physics Today, May 1987, p. 47).

In summary, the
letters to Marić show Einstein referring to his studies, his
ideas, his work on the electrodynamics of moving bodies over a dozen
times (and we may add a couple more if we include his letter to Grossmann), as
compared to one reference to our work on the problem of relative
motion. In the one case where we have a letter of Marić in direct response
to one of Einstein's, where it would have been most natural for her to respond
to his ideas on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, we find the same response
to ideas in physics that we find in all her letters: silence. This proves nothing,
as I emphasized in my paper, but it certainly must influence our estimate of
the probability that Marić made a significant contribution.

Albert Einstein
corresponded with his friend Michele Besso for about fifty years. Einstein's
letters to Besso are filled with scientific references, many more and in much
greater detail than in his letters to Marić. (For whatever reason,
scientific comments are almost entirely lacking in Einstein’s letters to
Marić after their marriage.) Besso’s letters to Einstein are similarly
filled with scientific comments. (The Einstein‑Besso correspondence has
been published in German with a French translation, so these claims are easily
checked.) Besso is also the only person Einstein thanks for help in his 1905
paper on special relativity. Yet Besso never wrote an important paper in
physics, and his efforts at collaborative research in general relativity with
Einstein came to naught. Late in his life, Einstein characterized Besso as an
“eternal student.” What does this mean? To me, it means that Besso was capable
of understanding things that Einstein explained to him, and of asking
intelligent questions that could help Einstein develop his own ideas
(Einstein's ideas, that is) – but that Besso was not capable of any creative
effort of his own. This is what I mean when I say that Besso acted as a
sounding board for Einstein.

Now I challenge
Walker and Troemel‑Ploetz: On the strength of the Einstein-Besso letters,
and the reference to Besso in Einstein’s 1905 relativity paper, do you want to
claim that Besso was the creative force behind Einstein, or even an equal
scientific partner in any of his creative work? If so, please explain why you
feel that Besso was, and where this leaves Marić. If not, please explain
why you feel that there is a stronger case for Mileva Marić than for
Besso. In her case, we have no published papers; no letters with
a serious scientific content, either to Einstein nor to anyone else; nor any
other objective evidence of her supposed creative talents. We do not
even have hearsay accounts of conversations she had with anyone else that have
a specific, scientific content, let alone a content claiming to report her
ideas. (If you believe any of these assertions to be wrong, please cite the
evidence for your belief.)

If
objective evidence of Marić’s
talent is uncovered in the future, I shall gladly acknowledge her role as
indicated by that evidence. Until then, I must continue to assert that the
probabilities are against her having played a creative role, but rather favor
her having played the role of a sounding board in the early years of her
relationship with Einstein just as Besso did. The evidence also indicates that
she ceased to play this role within a few years. Why this happened is a really
interesting question, and I don’t doubt it has something to do with Einstein’s
attitude to her. But exaggerated claims for her role on the basis of present
evidence can only do a disservice to her memory.